Getty Museum

Tomato Field, Big Sur

Date

June 30, 1937

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> In 1937 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Edward Weston its prestigious fellowship, making him the first photographer to receive such an honor. His fellowship was renewed for a second year in 1938. During the Guggenheim Fellowship years, Weston's visual approach to the world became increasingly more open. His slow, methodical technique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he spent hours composing and photographing single still-life arrangements in his studio, gave way to greater spontaneity and an embrace of diverse views. More and more, his frame included hills (as in this image), valleys, and coastlines in addition to the rocks and tree slumps found there. He focused, too, on less-static subjects, incorporating moving elements like breaking waves (see [89.XM.70.2](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/59139/edward-weston-rock-erosion-south-shore-point-lobos-american-1938/)) or drifting clouds (see [92.XM.41.2](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/98846/edward-weston-and-brett-weston-clouds-death-valley-american-negative-1939-print-1954/)). Still, his pictures from this period remained largely detached from the social, political, and economic climate of the times; almost never is the viewer aware of America's Depression-era circumstances in his images. > > The Guggenheim Fellowship was important to Weston's career not only for facilitating the proliferation of his work but also for making possible two projects that followed. He and his second wife, Charis Wilson (1914-2009), published a book, *California and the West*, in 1940 that included a selection of his photographs from and her writings about their trips. In addition to this achievement, Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation suggested that a large body of the fellowship pictures be deposited in the Huntington Library, a proposal with which Weston agreed enthusiastically. The Huntington, located near Los Angeles, decided after some hesitation to accept this work as a gift. The Guggenheim paid Weston for printing and matting supplies, and he delivered just over five hundred photographs to the Huntington over the course of several years. The gift did not consist exclusively of his work from the fellowship years but included a good number of images from both before and after the grant period. Weighted heavily toward landscape and conspicuously lacking in portraits and nudes, the group fit the Huntington's collecting interests more than it represented a balanced summation of his career. > > Adapted from Brett Abbott. *Edward Weston*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 78. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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